convened by John Brockman, author of The Third Culture,
founder of The Reality Club,
founder of EDGE, a web site presenting
the Third Culture in action

J O H N B R O C K M A N
In the 1960s, John Brockman, "the only denizen of New York's
bohemia with a business degree," backed Andy Warhol's
underground movies and organized many happenings; published
"By The Late John
Brockman", an early mix of cybernetic theory
& philosophy, and smuggled such intellectual contraband
as "The Whole Earth Software Catalog" into the techno-
illiterate Manhattan publishing world. (More on Brockman
below...)

bridging the gap between science,
technology, and the humanities
in contemporary culture

John Brockman is the author/editor of nineteen books, including
By the
Late John Brockman, The Third Culture, Digerati: Encounters
with the
Cyber Elite and (with Katinka Matson) How Things Are: A Science
Tool-Kit
for the Mind. He is founder of Brockman, Inc., a literary and
software
agency, President of Edge Foundation, Inc., founder of The Reality Club,
and editor and publisher of Edge, a website presenting The Third
Culture
in action.

Wired: You write in your introduction to
The Third Culture that
literary
Intellectuals are "reactionary and quite often proudly (and perversely)
ignorant of science, an attitude that has pushed science into cultural
invisibility in the last few generations. How does the smug,
anti-science,
anti-technology attitude you write of manage to dominate American culture?

Brockman: The literary culture I talk about is pretty well finished. Let
me emphasize that I'm not talking about all literature but about a
specific culture of literary commentators that became dominant about 50
years ago, In periodicals like The Partisan Review, Commentary and
Encounter, it was an establishment that dictated fashionable
discourse and
prided itself an its indifference to science. It favored opinions and
ideology over empirical testing of ideas -- commentary spiraling upon
commentary As a cultural force, it's a dead end. When I first came to New
York 30 years ago, it was important to get the latest issue of the
literary journals to read, say, Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann or Harold
Rosenberg on contemporary art. Nowadays, most of those journals are still
doing the same-old same-old; it's not about anything real, just facile
opinions of other facile opinions. That doesn't stop journalists and New
York media people from worshiping at its altar, though.

Wired: What damage has
the "hijacking" of intellectual media wrought?

In a culture shaped by
truly critical thinking and scientific method, being proven wrong, being
constantly challenged to prove your most cherished concepts, is understood
as part of intellectual evolution. In the mainstream literary world it's
not.
Serious critical thinking about new technology is what's at a premium.
Clifford Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil is foolishly dismissed as
"luddite" but he's merely trying to establish balance. Jerry Mander's
Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television taught me as much about
technology in 1977 as Marshall McLuhan did in the 1960s. It didn't
convince me to smash my television set. It did enable me to see for the
first time what television really Is, We need to cultivate a critical
perspective toward the tools we use.

Wired: Who are the prime enemies of the Third Culture?

It's not about
personalities but about cultural attitudes that reward ignorance. In
Europe, for instance. an editor or journalist will have studied physics
and will be able to hold a reasonably informed dialog with scientists.
Here, the deeply ingrained attitude that still dominates most media is
that "welleducated" people needn't have a clue about such "technical"
matters. Thankfully, the reading public knows better, and that's why so
many serious science books have done so well in the last decade, despite
the incomprehension and downright befuddlement of
those supposedly in the know.

Wired: You've said that when yet, started out,
publishing was run by "white boys
from Harvard in the '50s." How has It
changed?

About 10 Years ago, I went to a party
held by Richard E. Snyder, then-chair
of Simon & Schuster. Instead of a pub-
lishing crowd, his guests were invest-
ment bankers or real estate moguls.
Snyder presented a chilling vision of
publishing. He said that instead of 50
companies there would be six, vertically
integrated. He predicted that the
power would shift from the agents to
these new conglomerates.

Wired: Sounds pretty prophetic.

It turned out to be mostly true. What Is
publishing today? it's Newhouse, the Hearsts, Time Warner.
viecom, Bertelman, Pearson, Murdoch, and now Holzbrink.
Snyder was right, but be missed one thing. At the highest level,
everybody knows each other and It's a Same. They're enormously Wealthy
conglomerates, and they play to win. So my
strategy is to be the mosquito that makes the elephants dance.

Wired: What was your purpose Ii bringing together two dozen scientists
in The Third Culture?

I tried to reproduce for the reader the experience of dynamic complex
systems, a notion the scientists in the
book explore in various ways, it's a kind of "oral history" in which I try
to stand aside and convey the rich dialogues taking place between such
frontiers as molecular biology and artificial life, all the while letting
the top people speak in their own singular voice.

Wired: You're also "serializing" the book on the Internet, on GNN
(www.gnn.com).

Yes. The physical book becomes the table of contents for an exchange
between author, collaborators, and readers -- one that I hope will
continue far into the future. Tell me about content.com your Internet
publishing enterprise. On you moo the Web replacing books? Not in the
short run. The most interesting fact about the Net is that people there
enjoy reading and writing. content.com's first major site is going to be
called BookChannel -- a multimedia-rich, interactive electronic bazaar
devoted to books and readers, It will be the place for anyone interested
in new ideas. The book is still the best delivery system for new Ideas we
have. though that will eventually change.

Wired: How are traditional publishing companies Waiting to the Web?

The corporate owners and A few of the top trade publishing executives are
looking seriously at new technologies, but the trade publishers are still
mostly techno-illiterales. Many trade editors have e-mail addresses. The
problem is that most of them don't have computers and modems.

Wired: So what's the content of content.com?

Solely digitizing texts is not what it's about. It's about creating
intellectual community, where people come for the compelling subjects and
then stay for each other. We're trying to create a place that users
searching for state-of-the-art knowledge will rind reliable and credible.

The people I work with are mainly university people or specialists at the
absolute top of their fields. In many cases, they've invented the field.
But they are effective public thinkers, the true public Intellectuals of
our time -- in spite of academia, not because of it.

Wired: Computer scientist Denny Hillis says In your book that the term
"popularizer" is still an epithet among many academic scientists. You
were recently criticized In The New Republic as a purveyor of "soft
science.' How do you respond?

John Cage once told me to weigh my publicity rather than read it. The New
Republic weighs very little.